Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It is published by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York, P.O. Box 20587, Tompkins Square Station, New York, NY 10009, weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com.

ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com

*1. Latin America: Chile and Mexico Lead OECD in Income Inequality
Chile and Mexico have the highest level of income inequality among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the group announced on Jan. 23. The other OECD members with the widest gap between rich and poor are Israel, Turkey and the US, according to the OECD’s new report, Reducing Income Inequality While Boosting Economic Growth: Can It Be Done? Chile and Mexico are the only Latin American countries in the organization, which is mostly composed of higher-income nations. The US is the high-income nation with the worst record on income inequality.

“Rising inequality is one of the major risks to our future prosperity and security,” OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan warned in a statement. With the global downturn continuing more than three years after the September 2008 financial crisis, the OECD is pushing member countries to use tax reforms to reduce the level of inequality and to spur growth. Specifically, an OECD report released on Jan. 17 advised Chile to reduce poverty and create a tax system that does more to redistribute income. The report also called on Chile’s government “to make more of an effort to improve the quality of education and to guarantee a more equitable access to high-quality education”—the same reforms that a militant student movement has been pushing for since last spring [see Update #1110].

*2. Mexico: Fortuna Silver Mine Protester Killed
A dispute over a water pipeline in San José del Progreso, a municipality in the Ocotlán district of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, turned deadly on Jan. 18 when supporters of Mayor Alberto Mauro Sánchez Muñoz reportedly opened fire on demonstrators. Protesters Bernardo Méndez Vásquez and Abigail Vásquez Sánchez were wounded; Méndez Vásquez died the next day in a hospital in Oaxaca city, the state capital. Both were members of the United Peoples of the Ocotlán Valley Coordinating Committee (COPUVO), which has been engaged in a three-year struggle against the Trinidad silver mine owned by Compañia Minera Cuzcatlán S.A. de C.V., a subsidiary of Vancouver-based Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

The protesters charged that that work by the municipality on a pipeline was intended to divert community water to use by the mine; after the violence, COPUVO accused Mayor Sánchez Muñoz, who supports the mine, of giving the order to fire. But Fortuna Silver president Jorge Ganoza insisted that the confrontation was about “a long-standing political struggle for local power” and was “related to an infrastructure project that was being handled by the municipality of San José, and it's related to the interconnection of sewage and drinking water in the town of San José, and it has nothing to do” with the mine.

A number of Mexican organizations feel the Trinidad mine has exacerbated local tensions and so is the very at least partly responsible for the violence. Some 20 organizations, including COPUVO and the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC), held a demonstration outside the Canadian embassy in Mexico City on Jan. 25 to protest Canadian mining in Mexico. In a communiqué the groups charged that 26% of the country “is already in the hands of mining companies, and of the 757 projects, 73% are Canadian.” While mining proponents say the operations create local jobs, the groups cited the violence at San José del Progreso as an example of “the benefits these companies are leaving us.”

In other news, one worker was killed and six others injured on Jan. 28 when company guards fired on former employees of a shuttered factory in Ciudad Sahagún in the central state of Hidalgo. Illinois-based Motor Coach Industries International, Inc. (MCI) closed the plant in February 2003, leaving 1,300 workers without severance pay and other benefits. The new owners, identified by the Mexican media as Pacific International Development (PID), promised to pay the workers a total of 170 million pesos (about $13.1 million), but the workers say the company has only paid 10 million pesos to date. The workers attempted to occupy the plant on Jan. 28 when they heard that PID was removing the machinery. Guards hired by PID responded by firing on the protesters, fatally wounding José Matilde Cotonieto Sánchez. State and municipal police later arrested 14 people, including guards and employees.

The plant originally belonged to Diesel Nacional S.A. de C.V. (DINA), a government-owned enterprise founded in 1951 to build buses. DINA was sold to Mexican industrialist and politician Raymundo Gómez Flores during a wave of privatizations under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994); Gómez Flores reportedly sold the factory to MCI in 1995. (LJ 1/29/12) [MCI filed for bankruptcy protection in the US in 2008.]

*3. Guatemala: Ríos Montt Charged; Pérez Molina Denies Genocide
Guatemalan judge Carol Patricia Flores ruled on Jan. 26 that there was sufficient evidence to try former military dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-83) for genocide and other crimes against humanity. Some of the worst atrocities in a 36-year counterinsurgent war occurred during the time that Ríos Montt headed the government, including killings in the Ixil Mayan region that amounted to genocide according to a 1999 report by a United Nations-backed truth commission [see Update #1114]. The specific charges against Ríos Montt are based on 72 incidents that caused 1,771 deaths under his military command. (The Jurist 1/27/12)

Nery Rodenas, the director of the Human Rights Office of the Guatemala Archdiocese, called Judge Flores’ decision “brave,” but he noted the victims’ long struggle to reach this point. “This is a story that didn’t begin yesterday,” Rodenas said. “The victims have spent more than 10 years waiting. This has involved overcoming intimidation, threats and obstacles in the justice system.” Newly inaugurated Guatemala president Otto Pérez Molina, who was a major in the army during Ríos Montt’s regime, said he was respectful of judicial decisions, but he added: “There was no genocide; it was an armed internal conflict. Now we should be seeking reconciliation.” (Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 1/28/12; La Raza (Chicago) 1/28/12 from unidentified wire services)

*4. Honduras: Another Aguán Campesino Leader Murdered
Two men on a motorcycle gunned down Honduran campesino activist Matías Valle Cárdenas on Jan. 20 as he was leaving his home in Quebradas de Arena, Tocoa municipality in the northern department of Colón. Valle was a leader in the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), one of several campesino groups fighting for land redistribution in the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Hondruas. More than 50 campesinos and private security guards have been killed in Aguán land conflicts over the past two years. Valle’s murder came just three days after the killing of attorney José Ricardo Rosales in the northern city of Tela shortly after he reported abuses by local police [see Update #1114].

According to the French-based organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Honduran journalists Gilda Silvestrucci and Itsmania Pineda Platero both received threatening phone calls in January. The two women were among a group of journalists that organized a Dec. 13 march to the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to protest free speech violations; the march was violently dispersed by the police. Silvestrucci edits the online newspaper El Patriota and produces a program on Radio Globo; both media opposed the June 2009 military coup that overthrew President José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales. Silvestrucci received an anonymous call on her cell phone on Jan. 23. “We know that you have three children,” the caller said, “that the oldest is 15, that at this moment you are walking down the street with your seven-year-old son and that the oldest is at home looking after the one-year-old baby, and we are going to kill you.” (Notimex 1/20/12 via Univision; RSF 1/24/12)

While US media coverage has tended to attribute violence in Honduras and the country’s rising crime rate mostly to drug traffickers, a Jan. 22 article by Frances Robles in the Miami Herald focuses on the role of corruption in law enforcement, from low-ranking police agents to top officials. Honduran law enforcement is “rotten to the core,” Gustavo Alfredo Landaverde, a former adviser to the government on drug trafficking, told Robles two weeks before his murder [see Update #1111]. “We are at the border of an abyss. These are criminal organizations inside and out.” (MH 1/22/12)

A Jan. 20 op-ed in the New York Times goes further, discussing the role of the 2009 coup in the growth of this corruption. “[T]he coup was what threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence,” University of California Santa Cruz history professor Dana Frank writes, “and it unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression.” Frank notes that the US government was quick to recognize the questionable elections held by the de facto regime in November 2009. “This chain of events—a coup that the United States didn’t stop, a fraudulent election that it accepted—has now allowed corruption to mushroom. The judicial system hardly functions. Impunity reigns.” Honduras is descending into “a human rights and security abyss,” Frank says. “That abyss is in good part the [US] State Department’s making.” (NYT 1/20/12)

ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/

*1. Argentina: Subway Workers and Riders Unite Against Fare Hike
Argentine judge Fernando Juan Lima ruled on Jan. 16 that the Buenos Aires city government could continue for now with a 127% increase it had imposed for the subway fare on Jan. 6. A coalition including unions, student groups and political and social organizations had filed for an emergency injunction to halt the increase, which raises the fare to 2.5 pesos (about 58 cents).

Judge Lima rejected the emergency injunction on the grounds that the increase wouldn’t “cause irreparable harm” to the system’s two million users. But the judge noted that he hadn’t issued a final ruling on the coalition’s case against the increase, and he said he would act on that within 20 days.

The coalition--the Multi-Sector Committee Against the Fare Hike in the Subte (as the subway system is known)--didn’t limit itself to using legal maneuvers to fight the fare hike. The groups also collected more than 200,000 signatures on a petition against the increase, which they said would be a hardship for poorer riders, and presented it to Judge Lima. Subway workers protested the increase by opening the turnstiles during rush hours for about a week and letting passengers ride for free. [The Union Association of Subte and Premetro Workers (AGTSyP), part of the coalition, used this tactic when it sought recognition as a union in 2009; see Update #1004.]

As of Jan. 18 the coalition was determined to continue the fight but seemed divided on what tactics to follow after Lima ruled against the emergency injunction.

At the same time that he was facing angry subway riders and workers, Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri was also in a dispute with the city’s “manteros,” vendors who sell handcrafts, blankets and clothing on Florida Street in the center of the city. On Jan. 16 the vendors blocked Corrientes Street to protest Macri’s decision the week before to send the Metropolitan police to remove them, a move that resulted in confrontations and injuries. The vendors have also protested by selling their wares in front of the Congress. They argue that their activities are protected by Article 83 of Law 1472, which allows artists and makers of handcrafts to occupy public space.

Until this year subsidies from the federal government made it possible to maintain low fares in the capital’s subway system. But the administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner--the head of a left-leaning section of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist) who began her second four-year term on Dec. 10--is now drastically cutting subsidies for transportation and utilities. The Argentine consulting firm Econométrica projects that the growth rate for the national economy will fall to 2% this year, down from 7% in 2011, partly as a result of the global economic crisis. Facing a shortfall, the Fernández government is retreating from generous social spending that has helped contain conflicts in the decade since Argentina’s 2001-2002 economic crisis; the president’s critics say the spending also helped her win an easy electoral victory last October.

*2. Ecuador: Indigenous and Women’s Groups Slam Correa
On Jan. 10 the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the country’s main indigenous umbrella group, issued a communiqué reporting a “surprising and inexplicable” police presence in the organization’s headquarters in Quito. “[A]round 9:45 am police arrived [in a ] truck [at] the CONAIE offices, and two police agents dressed in black entered inside the offices,” the group wrote. Asked to explain their presence, one agent mentioned a possible danger to CONAIE president Humberto Cholango; later the agents said they were there to protect a meeting of indigenous organizations scheduled for that day. CONAIE said it hadn’t reported any dangers or asked for protection, and the group denounced the “arbitrary and illegal acts against social organizations that [are] being implemented in Ecuador.” (CONAIE communiqué 1/10/12)

The incident shows the level of distrust that has developed between popular Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa and many of the grassroots and leftist organizations that helped bring him to office five years ago. It came just as Correa was preparing to celebrate the fifth anniversary on Jan. 15 of his first inauguration and of the start of what he calls the “citizens’ revolution.”

Respected figures from the Latin American left and social movements and the arts attended festivities held in Cuenca, including Cuban musician Pablo Milanés and the Guatemalan indigenous activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the winner of the 1992 Nobel peace prize. But Menchú also paid a visit to CONAIE president Cholango, who gave her a document that accused Correa’s government of criminalizing social protest and of bringing legal cases against indigenous leaders. In the past five years, Cholango told Menchú, the government had failed to push forward agrarian reform, the redistribution of water rights, the democratization of the economy and the development of a state that recognizes Ecuador’s different nationalities. (El Tiempo (Quito) 1/10/12)

Camila Vallejo Dowling, the best known of the leaders of Chile’s militant student movement, was also expected at the celebration, but on Jan. 10 she announced via Twitter that she wouldn’t attend, because of “time and responsibilities here in Chile.” (El Comercio (Cuenca) 1/10/12)

Meanwhile, Correa offended women activists in his own PAIS (Proud and Sovereign Nation) Alliance with remarks he made on Dec. 31 during his weekly television program. “I don’t know if gender equality improves democracy,” he said. “What is certain is that it has improved the party”—a New Year’s Eve party for government ministers and members of the National Assembly. “What pretty Assembly members we have! We need to raise their salaries, since they didn’t have money to buy enough cloth, with all of them in miniskirts. My God…they told me they have some amazing legs.”

On Jan. 10 a group of women, including members of his party, sent Correa a letter saying that “[s]ince politics is also pedagogy and a president’s discourse can send many messages, allow us to remind you how the participation of women has improved democracy.” They noted that a democracy is incomplete if it excludes half the population, and that women have strengthened democracy by “questioning the traditional division between the public and the private spheres.” “Machismo too is violence,” they concluded. But another PAIS Alliance member, Loja province governor Alicia Jaramillo, defended Correa: “This is the first government that has included women in ministerial posts,” she said, attributing the president’s Dec. 31 remarks to his good humor. (Otra América website 1/10/12)

The Coordinating Committee for the Unity of the Lefts has chosen Mar. 8, International Women’s Day, to protest government policies with a national march “for life, democracy and the defense of natural resources.” The sponsoring coalition includes CONAIE, the National Union of Educators (UNE), the Unified Workers Front and the Federation of Secondary and University Students. (El Comercio 1/17/12)

*3. Honduras: Lawyer Killed After Reporting Police Abuses
Three unidentified men gunned down attorney José Ricardo Rosales the morning of Jan. 17 near his office or residence (the accounts differ) in the coastal city of Tela in the northern Honduran department of Atlántida. The murder came just four days after the San Pedro Sula daily El Tiempo ran a news report on Rosales’ claim that Tela police agents had been abusing detainees. Rosales may also have offended the authorities by carrying out a successful defense of Marco Joel Alvarez (“Unicorn”) against government charges that he was responsible for the March 2011 murder of radio and television journalist David Meza in the nearby city of La Ceiba. Meza had regularly criticized the police force on his programs.

Some 30 lawyers have reportedly been killed in Honduras since 2008, while 17 journalists were murdered from 2010 through 2011. President Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa has been conducting purges of the country’s 14,000 police agents over the last three months, but this has done little to end complaints that the police abuse detainees and collaborate with drug traffickers and other criminals [see Updates #1104, 1112]. Tela’s police force was removed just days before Rosales made his accusations, and a new force was brought in: the new agents were the ones Rosales accused of abusing detainees. “[I]f the previous agents go away and they send us others who are worse...we’re not accomplishing anything,” he told El Tiempo.(El Tiempo 1/13/12; La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 1/18/12; AP 1/18/12 via El Nuevo Herald (Miami))

*4. Guatemala: Will Ríos Montt Finally Face Genocide Charges?
Former Guatemalan military dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-83) is to appear before a judge on Jan. 26 in what could become a trial for genocide. Ríos Montt headed the government during one of the bloodiest periods in a 36-year counterinsurgent war that left more than 200,000 people dead, mostly civilians. After the fighting ended in 1996 Ríos Montt re-emerged as a politician, leading the rightwing Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) and holding a seat in Congress from 2000 until this month. The legislative position gave him immunity from prosecution, which has now ended.

Guatemala’s new president, Otto Pérez Molina, who was inaugurated on Jan. 14, was a major in the army during the Ríos Montt dictatorship [see World War 4 Report 11/7/11]. He operated around Nebaj, El Quiché department, in the Ixil Mayan region, where the killings amounted to genocide according to a 1999 report by a truth commission backed by the United Nations. The new president denies any involvement in war crimes and says he’ll support efforts by the attorney general to bring human rights cases to trial. (New York Times 1/23/12)

Titular de Hoy: Guatemala, a documentary from 1983 which appeared on Finnish television, includes a scene in which Pérez Molina, then known in the Nebaj area as “Commander Tito,” is interviewed by US investigative reporter Allan Nairn. The scene, which was posted separately on YouTube in May 2011, shows Commander Tito standing near several battered corpses in Nebaj; one of his soldiers said these were captives Pérez Molina had “interrogated.” ( “Democracy Now!” 1/17/12)

*5. Cuba: Government Denies Prisoner Died From Hunger Strike
The Cuban government announced on Jan. 20 that a prisoner, Wilmar Villar Mendoza, had died the day before in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Santiago de Cuba. The government said Villar had been hospitalized six days before with pneumonia and had died of “generalized infection.” According to Villar’s wife, Maritza Pelegrino, the prisoner had been on hunger strike from Nov. 25 to Dec. 23 to protest his four-year prison sentence and had resumed the strike on Dec. 29. Elizardo Sánchez, a well-known Cuban dissident, said Villar had been active in with an opposition group since last summer.

US president Barack Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, released a statement on Jan. 20 calling Villar “a young and courageous defender of human rights and fundamental freedoms in Cuba who launched a hunger strike to protest his incarceration and succumbed to pneumonia.” The Cuban government denied that Villar had been on hunger strike or that he was a political prisoner; the Cubans said the US, Spain and Chile were “manipulating” the death and called them “interventionists…without moral authority.” (White House statement 1/20/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 1/21/12 from correspondent; El Universal (Mexico) 1/22/12 from correspondent)

On Jan. 12 the noted Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano visited Cuba for the first time since 2003, when he, along with Portuguese author José Saramago and other leftist intellectuals, criticized the Cuban government’s execution of three boat hijackers and the imprisonment of 75 dissidents. The occasion for Galeano’s visit was the Jan. 16 ceremony for the literature prize awarded annually by Casa de las Américas, a major Cuban cultural organization. “The true friend is the one who criticizes you to your face and praises you behind your back,” Galeano said during his visit, adding that he was quoting the late Carlos Fonseca Amador, a founder of Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN).

According to Galeano, his most famous work, The Open Veins of Latin America, failed to win the Casa de las Américas prize in 1971 because the jury didn’t consider the book “serious enough.” “It was a period in which the left still confused being serious with being boring,” he said. “Fortunately, this was changing, and in our days it is known that the best ally of the left is laughter.” (LJ 1/17/12 from correspondent)

ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com

*1. Chile: Did the Mapuche Cause Wildfires, or Was It Climate Change?
A series of raids and house fires in southern Chile followed the filing of a criminal complaint on Jan. 6 by the government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera implying that indigenous Mapuche activists were responsible for recent major forest fires in the Biobío and Araucanía regions [see World War 4 Report 1/7/12]. The complaint was based on an “antiterrorism” law passed during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and used repeatedly to repress protests by Mapuche activists seeking to regain control of ancestral lands being exploited by timber companies [see Update #1083].

On the night of Jan. 7, the day after the government’s legal action, five masked men set fire to two mediaguas (prefabricated houses) in the La Marina estate in the Pidima de Ercilla sector of Araucanía; the authorities said the houses belonged to a retired military officer and that the attackers exchanged gunfire with police agents. At 6 am the next morning the carabineros militarized police raided Chequenko, a Mapuche community in Pidima, apparently in response to the attack on the La Marina estate. According to José Venturelli of the nongovernmental Ethical Commission Against Torture, some 200 agents armed with handguns, rifles and tear gas grenades carried out a “massive attack” on the community.

On Jan. 10 masked members of the indigenous community of Rofue--near Araucanía’s capital, Temuco--blocked a highway to protest the construction of an airport. The police claimed the demonstrators fired at them with birdshot when they tried to break up the protest. Carabineros then raided the nearby village of José Jineo Ñanco, according to residents. In one incident, videotaped on a cellphone and posted on the internet, two agents approached Guillermina Painebilu and her daughter, Jessica Guzmán Painebilu, as they stood in a field holding a baby. One agent struck Guillermina Painebilu with a rifle butt and then pointed the rifle at her. Both women were arrested, but on Jan. 10 Temuco judge Federico Gutiérrez dismissed all charges against them and ordered carabineros commanders to investigate the agents’ actions. (UPI 1/11/12 via Noticias.123 (Chile); DPA 1/12/12 via La Gaceta de Tucumán (Argentina); Crónica de Hoy (Mexico City) 1/12/12 from unnamed wire services)

The most recent of the major forest fires in southern Chile began on Jan. 5 in Carahue community in Araucanía; seven firefighters died while combating the blaze. Police investigators said the fire was started in 83 different places at the same time, indicating it was set intentionally. Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter cast suspicion on the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Committee (CAM), a militant Mapuche organization. But a CAM leader, Héctor Llaitul Carillanca, currently serving a 14-year prison sentence [see Update #1081], told interviewers that starting a forest fire would be “outside our line of action.” The accusations were a setup to justify the application of the “antiterrorist” law to Mapuche communities, Llaitul said, and to use it “to confront Chile’s student and social movements as well, anticipating a year in which greater mobilizations and struggles may appear.”

Conadi director José Santos Millao said President Piñera and Interior Minister Hinzpeter were seeking to create “a type of apartheid, a type of Nazism or fascism.” Some Mapuche activists blamed the fires on the introduction of exotic tree species that they say exacerbated a drought as the Southern Hemisphere’s summer was beginning, while the Ethical Commission Against Torture’s José Venturelli accused the timber companies of setting the fires themselves “to collect insurance payments they couldn’t get for infected trees that can’t be sold.” (ANSA 1/8/12; BBC News 1/9/12; Página 12 (Argentina) 1/11/12 from correspondent; La Tercera (Chile) 1/15/12)

There have been an exceptional number of forest fires in South America since December. One fire destroyed 1,000 hectares in Argentina’s Chubut province, and more than 700 hectares of forest were burned in Paraguay’s Caazapá National Park. The main cause is a series of severe droughts which weather experts blame on a combination of factors: the regularly occurring La Niña weather pattern and climate change resulting from human activity. “I think you really have to point the finger at human-caused climate change as having tipped the scales to make previously unprecedented weather events more possible, and multiple unprecedented weather events like we're seeing,” Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground website, told the Associated Press wire service. “There is so much regular variation in the weather, and it's hard to pick out the signal from the noise. But the signal’s sure getting pretty strong now.” (Prensa Latina 1/6/12; AP 1/6/12 via ABC News)

*2. Honduras: Family Killed in Latest Aguán Massacre
Eight people, including four children, were murdered in the village of Regaderos, in Sabá municipality in the northern Honduran department of Colón, on the evening of Jan. 9. Seven of the victims were members of the same campesino family; the eighth was a man running errands. The attackers took the victims from the family’s home to a field and killed them there with machetes and firearms. The youngest of the children was one year old; the others were seven, 12 and 15 years old. The attackers cut a part of the ear off each of the eight bodies. (El Tiempo (San Pedro Sula) 1/10/12)

The massacre was one of three mass killings in northern Honduras since the beginning of the year. Six people were murdered on Jan. 3 in the village of El Palmar, Las Vegas municipality, Santa Bárbara, in northwestern Honduras, and four members of one family were killed on Jan. 10 in the Rivera Hernández section of the main northern city, San Pedro Sula. There were 6,723 homicides in Honduras from January 2011 to Dec. 15, according to researchers at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH). With a homicide rate of 82 per 100,000 inhabitants, Honduras is the most violent country in Central America and one of the five most violent countries in Latin America. (Proceso Digital (Honduras) 1/11/12)

Sabá municipality, where the campesino family was massacred the night of Jan. 9, is in the Lower Aguán Valley, the site of violent land disputes between campesinos and large landowners [see Update #1102]. Colón chief of police Osmín Bardales almost immediately ruled out any connection between these disputes and the murders.

But the Honduras Culture and Politics blog points out that it is typical for both police and media to play down possible political motives behind violence in Honduras. One example is the US media’s tendency to blame Honduras’ homicide rate on the increase in drug trafficking through the country. But a United Nations report released on Oct. 6, Global Study on Homicide, notes that there isn’t always a connection: “Organized criminal groups involved in drug trafficking do not necessarily make themselves visible through violent and lethal crime…. Violence often escalates when an existing status quo is broken, as a result, for example, of changes in the structure of the drug market, the emergence of new protagonists or the ‘threat’ posed by police repression.” Meanwhile, the media rarely mention the increase in murders of women, campesinos and transsexuals since the June 2009 military coup that overthrew President José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 1/12/12)

As of Jan. 6 the Honduran government appeared have made no progress in a plan to buy 5,700 hectares of land in the Aguán to turn over to campesino collectives as a way of ending at least some of the land disputes. Alba-Petróleos, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), reportedly offered about $28.8 million to help with this plan [see Update #1111]. President Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa still seemed interested in this proposal on Jan. 6. “Just imagine,” Lobo said, “someone gives the campesinos financing at low interest rates in long-term loans. What I can say is: best wishes and thanks.” (Proceso Digital 1/6/12)

*3. Mexico: US Drug Agents Aided the Beltrán Leyva Cartel
Agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) worked with an informant and with Mexican enforcement agents in 2007 to launder millions of dollars for Mexico’s Beltrán Leyva cartel, according to reports in the New York Times and the Mexican magazine emeequis. The information comes from the Mexican government’s response to a US request for the extradition of Harold Mauricio Poveda-Ortega, a Colombian drug trafficker arrested in Mexico in November 2010.

According to documents the Mexican government supplied in the extradition case, in January 2007 a DEA informant began seeking money-laundering jobs from Poveda-Ortega, who was supplying Colombian drugs to the Mexican cartel headed by Arturo Beltrán Leyva and his three brothers. In July, the informant and a group of DEA agents laundered about $1 million through a Bank of America branch in Dallas and had it delivered to someone in Panama. In August and September they worked with an undercover Mexican agent to launder $499,250 on one occasion and $1 million on another. In October the DEA helped the Beltrán Leyva cartel ship 330 kilograms of cocaine through Dallas from Ecuador to Madrid, where Spanish authorities seized the drugs after being tipped off by the DEA.

As reported by the New York Times in December, the US government claims that this type of operation is useful in tracking criminal activity and leads to the arrests of cartel leaders [see Update #1109]. Arturo Beltrán Leyva was killed in a shootout with Mexican security forces in 2009, and apparently information from the US led to the Mexican operation. But the Beltrán Leyva cartel remains a major criminal organization. Morris Panner, a former assistant US attorney and an adviser on drug policy at Harvard University, described the DEA’s strategy “a slippery slope. If it’s not careful, the United States could end up helping the bad guys more than hurting them.” (NYT 1/9/12)

On Jan. 10 the Mexican government gave its official statistics on drug-related homicides for 2011. The Mexican Attorney General’s Office (PGR) reported that 12,903 deaths of this sort had occurred as of Sept. 30, giving a total of 47,453 drug-related homicides since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa took office in December 2006. The Los Angeles Times reports that with the presidential election coming up in six months, Calderón’s government was reluctant to release the numbers and only did so under pressure. (LAT 1/11/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 1/12/12)

Crime reporting is inconsistent in Mexico, with the result that official and nongovernmental figures sometimes differ considerably. Earlier this month the Mexican daily La Jornada gave a much lower figure, 11,890, for homicides in 2011 but a much higher figure, 51,918, for the total since December 2006 [see Update #1111].

*4. Mexico: Local Police Suspected in Deaths at Guerrero Protest
On Jan. 12 ballistics experts and investigators from Mexico’s governmental National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) carried out a reconstruction of a confrontation last month between student protesters and police on a highway in the southwestern state of Guerrero. Two students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the nearby village of Ayotzinapa were killed on Dec. 12 when state and federal police tried to disperse some 500 protesters blocking the highway; a worker at a gas station near the road also died, in a fire reportedly caused by a Molotov cocktail thrown by a student [see Update #1112].

Using lasers, the experts determined that the two students were killed by gunfire from an eastern location where Guerrero ministerial police (formerly known as “judicial police”) were stationed. CNDH inspector Luis García López Guerrero emphasized that the investigation hadn’t ended and that state police agents might not be the only ones responsible for the incident, in which he said 31 people were injured, one was tortured, and four suffered gunshot wounds. The inspector noted that the Federal Police (PF) were the first to use tear gas at the beginning of the confrontation. The CNDH would also “investigate and not leave in impunity the case of the gas station worker,” he promised.

On Jan. 13 the CNDH investigators visited the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college to see the conditions that set off the student protests. Afterwards Luis García López Guerrero told reporters that the situation at the under-funded school made it difficult “for the subject of education to be developed in an appropriate manner” there. (La Jornada (Mexico) 1/14/12, ___ )

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ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com

*1. Haiti: UN Claims Progress--Two Years After Quake
International efforts to help Haiti recover from a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated the southern part of the country in 2010 have made significant progress, United Nations Development Program (UNDP) associate administrator Rebeca Grynspan told reporters on Jan. 6. Speaking less than a week before the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 12, 2010 quake, Grynspan cited the creation of 300,000 temporary jobs, with 40% going to women, and the removal of 50% of the debris, about five million cubic meters--enough to fill five soccer stadiums, according to Grynspan. International aid has now shifted “from the humanitarian phase to the recovery and reconstruction phases,” she said. (United Nations News Center 1/6/12; AlterPresse (Haiti) 1/8/12)

Haitian prime minister Garry Conille was equally upbeat when talking to the press in December. He announced that in the two months since his confirmation, the new government had made many advances in helping the earthquake survivors who still live in temporary camps. Conille said his administration’s priority is relocating the thousands of homeless people camped out in the Champ de Mars, a huge park that faces the National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince, and making sure “that they’ll be able to go to a zone that is secure.” This is to be done, according to the prime minister, through the “16/6” program, a government plan to move the displaced from six camps into 16 neighborhoods, with each family receiving 20,000 gourdes (about $496) to pay for new homes. (Haïti Libre (Haiti) 12/17/11)

But a Jan. 8 report by the Associated Press wire service noted that hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in camps or badly damaged buildings. While United Nations (UN) secretary general Ban Ki-moon and the UN special envoy, former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), promised “that the world would help Haiti ‘build back better,’ and $2.38 billion has been spent, Haitians have hardly seen any building at all,” AP reporter Trenton Daniel wrote. “Of the 10 best-funded projects approved by a reconstruction panel, not one focuses exclusively on housing.”

One of these projects is the Parc Industriel de Caracol (Caracol Industrial Park, PIC), a factory complex being built with $225 million in international financing, $124 million of it from the US [see Update #1108]. The project includes housing for 5,000 workers, but PIC is located in the northeast, 240 km (150 miles) from the area affected by the earthquake. The best-publicized effort to provide new homes for the displaced was the spring 2010 relocation of 5,000 people from a golf course in Pétionville, an affluent Port-au-Prince suburb, to Corail-Cesselesse, a deserted area 24 km north of the capital. This too was promoted as a plan for providing housing around a proposed industrial park [see Update #1052]. “That never happened,” according to the AP report. “Today, the people of Corail-Cesselesse are ravaged by floods or bake in the heat in their timber-frame shelters…far from the jobs that sustained them before the quake.”

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC, or CIRH in French and Spanish), which international donors set up in March 2010 to monitor the distribution of international aid, is now out of operation. The Haitian Parliament refused to renew the IHRC’s mandate at the end of October on the grounds that the commission, which Bill Clinton co-chaired, had inadequate Haitian representation [see Update #1099]. (AP 1/8/12 via WTOP (Washington, DC)

*2. Mexico: Guerrero Students Occupy Radio Stations
Dozens of students occupied four radio stations in Chilpancingo, capital of the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero, for about an hour on Jan. 3 in an attempt to publicize their positions on an ongoing conflict at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the nearby village of Ayotzinapa. The conflict intensified when two students were shot dead on Dec. 12 as state and federal police attempted to remove some 500 protesters blocking the Mexico City-Acapulco highway to push their demands for improvements at the school [see Update #1109]. The students, along with parents and other supporters, occupied the school over the Christmas and New Year break and said they planned to maintain their mobilization after the official school opening on Jan. 3.

The student protests had started with demands for expanding the student body and for resuming classes, which had been suspended since Nov. 2 because of a dispute involving the teachers and the school administration. Following the shootings on Dec. 12, the students added a demand for the resignation of Guerrero governor Ángel Heladio Aguirre Rivero and for a thorough investigation of the police action. The students also want to know the status of the federal police agents who had been active in the operation. The media reported that 12 state police were put under restrictions after the killings but said nothing about the federal police, according to the students.

A gas station near the highway caught fire during the Dec. 12 confrontation, apparently because a Molotov cocktail thrown by a student hit a gas pump. Gonzalo Miguel Rivas Cámara, a worker at the station, was injured in the fire; he died of his injuries early on Jan. 8. (La Jornada (Mexico) 1/2/12, 1/4/12)

*3. Mexico: Ex-President Claims Immunity in Acteal Massacre
Former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994-2000) filed papers in US district court in Hartford, Connecticut, on Jan. 6 claiming that his presidential status gives him immunity from a legal action stemming from a December 1997 massacre in the southeastern state of Chiapas. Ten unnamed survivors of the massacre of 45 indigenous campesinos in the community of Acteal are demanding $50 million in damages in a suit they filed against Zedillo in Hartford on Sept. 19. The former president is currently teaching at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Since he is in the US, he is subject to two US laws--the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 and the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act--which permit foreigners to bring suits in US courts for violence that occurred in other countries.

The Acteal killings were carried out by indigenous paramilitaries against members of the Civil Society Organization Las Abejas (“The Bees”). The Mexican government has always contended that the killings arose from long-standing conflicts between indigenous communities. Dozens of men from neighboring villages were convicted of participating in the massacre, although the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) overturned 22 of the convictions in August 2009 [see World War 4 Report 8/16/09].

Zedillo’s 122-page court filing called charges that the former president “was somehow complicit” in the killings “baseless and outrageous.” But the massacre occurred during conflicts between the government and the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), and the Acteal community was sympathetic to the EZLN. A number of Mexican analysts feel that Zedillo’s government may have trained and backed the paramilitaries, or at the very least aggravated tensions between EZLN supporters and opponents in Chiapas.

“[W]ithout doubt, in Zedillo there was complicity or [guilt by] omission for the tragic events in Acteal,” former legislator Jaime Martínez Veloz told the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada. Martínez Veloz had been a member of the Concord and Peacemaking Commission (COCOPA), a multi-party congressional commission sent by the federal government to negotiate with the EZLN starting in 1994. “Ultimately, Acteal is the most brutal expression of the failure to comply with the San Andrés Accords,” he said, referring to an agreement COCOPA worked out providing more autonomy for indigenous communities in Chiapas. Zedillo’s government rejected the accords, leaving the conflicts unresolved. (CNN 1/6/12; LJ 1/7/12 from Notimex, 1/8/12 by staff)

*4. Honduras: Police Torture Priest and His Brothers
Marco Aurelio Lorenzo, a Catholic priest based in the western Honduran department of Santa Bárbara, filed a criminal complaint with the Public Ministry on Jan. 4 charging that he and his two brothers had been tortured by eight police agents. Lorenzo said the attack occurred on Dec. 26 on a road between La Esperanza and San Miguelito, Intibucá department, as the brothers were driving to visit their parents in Yamaranguila, also in Intibucá. “They beat us on every part of our bodies,” Lorenzo told reporters after filing the charges in the northern city of San Pedro Sula.

The new accusation against the police follows several months of media reports about police involvement in corruption, drug trafficking, auto theft and murders, including the Oct. 22 killing of two college students [see Update #1104]. (EFE 1/4/12 via Univision, 1/5/12 via Latin American Herald Tribune)

Lorenzo is known for his activism in defense of the environment. He was arrested and beaten by police agents on July 17, 2007, after a peaceful protest against open-pit mining, and he was beaten by three unidentified men on Aug. 13, 2004. The Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH) is demanding that the Honduran government take measures to guarantee the physical integrity of Lorenzo and his brothers and their access to justice, without allowing reprisals against them. The human rights organization asks for letters to be sent to Honduran officials, including Supreme Court President Jorge Alberto Rivera Avilés (cedij@poderjudicial.gob.hn) and Public Prosecutions Director (lrubi@mp.hn ), with copies to COFADEH (berthacofadeh@yahoo.com ). (Alliance for Global Justice alert 1/5/12)

On Oct. 29 we finished clearing out the New York Nicaragua Solidarity Network’s longtime office at 339 Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan to make room for the new tenants: the New York State Youth Leadership Council, an organization of undocumented youth. In addition to its ongoing organizing and educational work, the NYSYLC is known for bold and imaginative actions, including a 10-day hunger strike on the sidewalk in front of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office in June 2010.

We’re delighted that the office is getting good use now—and for a cause as critical as immigrant rights. The Network is continuing to publish the online edition of Weekly News Update on the Americas--we hope you'll continue to read it.

It was a lot of work to clean up an office that had been used for more than 25 years by various groups--Nicaragua Support Project, NY Nicaragua Construction Brigade, ¡Adelante! Street Theater Project, Campaign for Real Equitable Economic Development (CREED), Coalition for the Human Rights of Immigrants and the Global Sweatshop Coalition--and we needed a lot of help. We won’t try to name all the people who participated, but they know who they are, and we appreciate all that they did.

2. New life at the old building
The NYSYLC isn’t the only new tenant at 339 Lafayette Street. Since October the building has provided an office for Global Revolution TV, which is best known for its live-stream video coverage from Occupy Wall Street; it also receives and distributes live feeds from independent journalists on the ground at nonviolent protests around the world.

Global Revolution TV has gotten the most media attention recently—in the New Yorker, for instance, and on CNN Money and Wired News—but 339 Lafayette continues to host a range of other activist groups, from the War Resisters League and the Granny Peace Brigade to the Socialist Party and the Met Council on Housing. The building, which is managed by the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, has structural problems, but there may be ways to rehabilitate it and preserve this important movement resource. For updates, go tohttp://ajmuste.org/bldgupdate.html And you can donate at: https://www.justgive.org/giving/donate.jsp?charityId=4046&amp;

Our collection of posters and political buttons from a variety of movements is going to the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG), which has the largest collection of post-World War 2 political graphics in the United States.

We want to stress the importance of preserving movement materials and making them available both to historians and to the general public. The media have done their best to ignore or dismiss our movements over the years, with the result that we’re often unaware of our own history, and unable to learn from our successes and our failures. We need to make sure our history doesn’t disappear.

If people know about the Central America solidarity movement at all, they probably think of the “sandalista” stereotype, not what we did to increase awareness about Central America in the 1980s, or how we worked to link the solidarity movement with support for the South African and Palestinian struggles, and with the work of homeless activists here in the US. Most of this never made it into the media or the history books, not even events as striking as our Sept. 12, 1987 action, in which solidarity activists set up more than 100 tables on New York City streets and in one day gathered at least 20,000 signatures demanding an end to US aid for the “contras,” who were murdering civilians and undermining the revolution in Nicaragua.

Please contact us at weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com if you’re interested in doing more to keep this history from going down the memory hole. We’d be happy to help with research, with setting up interviews with movement activists, or with pulling together an event on the history of the solidarity movement.

4. Progress on the John Ross archives
We’ve also been working with a project for archiving the writings of John Ross, the famously independent journalist who covered Mexican social movements—and many other subjects—for some 40 years before his death in January 2011.

For more than a decade the Nicaragua Solidarity Network and the Weekly News Update distributed John’s weekly columns, first México Bárbaro (396 articles) and then Blind Man’s Buff (191 articles). Some of the columns appeared in The Nation and other publications, and some were recycled into John’s books on Mexico, but many never would have been published if we hadn’t provided a platform. (This also generated some extra income for John, although never as much as he deserved.)

The result was that we had the most complete edited collection of John’s articles from 1996 to 2007. For some time John had been talking to us about ways to get them on line so that they would be accessible for people looking for information in English on what was happening in Mexico during those years. He became especially concerned about this after he was diagnosed with cancer in 2010.

The articles were residing precariously in two very old PCs, but we managed to rescue them, with a lot of help from movement technicians, and now we’ve sent all 587 columns to the team John got together to work on finding a university archive for his papers. Hopefully we’ll be able to report soon that a university has agreed to maintain a website for the full collection.

5. We still have banners—and expenses
We still have some banners that people might want to preserve for history or adapt for new uses. Contact us if you’re interested in any of them. See photos here:

One more thing: You’ve probably received plenty of year-end fundraising appeals from various worthy causes. We’re not sending you another. But we do have expenses from the old office, so if you really want to help, you can always make checks or money orders payable to Nicaragua Solidarity Network and mail them to PO Box 20587, Tompkins Square Station, New York, NY 10009.

And don’t forget that you can help maintain 339 Lafayette as an activist center by donating to the AJ Muste Memorial Institute (mark your gift “via NSN for sheltering” to designate it for the sheltering program that provides a space for activism to thrive and grow in New York City):https://www.justgive.org/giving/donate.jsp?charityId=4046&amp;
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About the Update

ISSN#: 1084 922X. From 1990 to 2015 Weekly News Update on the Americas covered news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It was published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York. We continue to post occasional links or articles. For more information, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com.